Des soleils encore verts

An exhi­bi­tion in move­ment with Léonore Camus-Govoroff, Louis Chaumier, Jérôme Girard, Ninon Hivert, Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos, Maïa Lacoustille, Lucille Leger, Masha Silchenko, Chloé Vanderstraeten

Curated by the Champs mag­né­tiques col­lec­tive

Opening of the 3rd occur­rence at Bétonsalon
Friday 30 July from 6pm to 10pm
Free entry from 30 July to 1st August from 11am to 7pm

Saturday 31st July

3pm. Modelling work­shop with Masha Silchenko in the tra­di­tional Japanese mod­elling tech­nique and around yōkai, super­nat­ural crea­tures in Japanese folk­lore.
You must reg­ister here

5pm. Concert by Poemo

Members of Champs Magnetiques Collective will remain at your dis­posal for guided tours of the exhi­bi­tion, in French, English, Spanish and Polish.

Past and upcoming occur­rences of the exhi­bi­tion
Mains d’Œuvres, 7-10 July 2021
CAC Brétigny, 15-17 July 2021
DOC!, 3-5 September 2021
La Passerelle, 16-18 September 2021

Des soleils encore verts [1] is an exhi­bi­tion in move­ment imag­ined by the Champs mag­né­tiques col­lec­tive, with work by nine recent grad­u­ates of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. The title of the pro­ject, taken from a poem by Andrée Chedid, can be trans­lated as Suns Still Green — it implies hope and new pos­si­bil­i­ties. The par­tic­i­pating artists are united by a shared interest in what could be, whether in our world or in another. The exhi­bi­tion offers poten­tial forms of resis­tance, new spir­i­tual hori­zons and alter­na­tive futures.

The exhi­bi­tion is designed to adapt, trans­form and pro­duce new forms of inter­ac­tion with art. It makes use of short open­ings in the pro­gram­ming of its host venues, taking place in sev­eral acts with each occu­pa­tion con­ceived as a frag­ment of a whole, growing out from pre­vious iter­a­tions and antic­i­pating what is yet to come. The exhi­bi­tion ini­ti­ates its own car­tog­raphy as it takes root across mul­tiple ter­ri­to­ries, allowing itself to be shaped by each venue.

The pro­ject’s first cycle unfolds in four spaces: Mains d’Œuvres, an inde­pen­dent venue that sup­ports artist pro­jects and cit­i­zens’ ini­tia­tives; CAC Brétigny, Contemporary Art Center of National Interest, whose struc­ture, marked by the the­o­ries of pop­ular edu­ca­tion and co-cre­ation, func­tions as a col­lec­tive space, each par­tic­i­pating actively in the con­struc­tion and iden­tity of the pro­ject; Bétonsalon, a centre for con­tem­po­rary art and research whose col­lab­o­ra­tive approach invites the ques­tioning of notions of hos­pi­tality and the com­mons; and finally DOC!, a space run by and for artists offering res­i­dence pro­grammes and exhi­bi­tions. Settling in other insti­tu­tions and artistic organ­i­sa­tions remains a pos­si­bility for the future, the pro­ject poten­tially migrating indef­i­nitely.

Des soleils encore verts ques­tions our rela­tion­ship to common spaces and refuges. These spaces can be places of com­fort, of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with one­self and others, but also reminders of loss. Within these areas emerge end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of rein­ven­tion. The artists exhibiting at Bétonsalon offer tem­po­rary respite and spaces of hos­pi­tality. Masha Silchenko and Léonore Camus-Govoroff reflect on the pri­vate and the domestic spheres, giving these envi­ron­ments a col­lec­tive dimen­sion of a safe space. Lucille Leger also uses these notions, qual­i­fying her hybrid sculp­tures as living organ­isms that interact between inte­rior and exte­rior spaces. Addressing the out­dated com­part­men­tal­iza­tion of art, design and everyday objects, her works take the form of biomor­phic fur­ni­ture, dis­rupting our notion of the inan­i­mate. Chloé Vanderstraeten dreams up cities in her tech­nical draw­ings, devel­oping imag­i­nary archi­tec­tures in which human activ­i­ties occur, like "building", "dreaming", "playing" or "cul­ti­vating". Such actions also mate­ri­alize in the work of Ninon Hivert, who col­lects traces of human move­ment so as to dis­play them in the exhi­bi­tion space. A keen observer of everyday life, she uses ceramics to create clothing-sculp­tures from a pho­to­graphic reper­toire of found objects. She thus expresses the pres­ence of bodies and past move­ments, fixed in time. In Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos’ work, the bed, a starting point for reflecting upon the common, can be trans­formed into a shelter, a bus stop or even a game table. Using it as a base, he cre­ates struc­tures which are made to host the work of another artist. The pro­cess is a moment of col­lab­o­ra­tion, a means of coex­isting. For Louis Chaumier, what appears to be fur­ni­ture is actu­ally use­less, their forms rather calling upon the need to recon­figure spaces for living together. As Jacques Derrida main­tains in De l’hos­pi­talité, the notion of hos­pi­tality pre­sup­poses a ques­tioning of the fron­tier “be­tween the familial and the non-familial, between the for­eign and the non­for­eign, the cit­izen and the non-cit­izen, but first of all between the pri­vate and the public [2]". These shel­ters, where one may take cover, allow us to slow down and wel­come others.

This first cycle of exhi­bi­tions develops upon fer­tile ground upon which emerge artistic, cura­to­rial and edi­to­rial prac­tices in per­petual evo­lu­tion. Champs mag­né­tiques seeks the pos­si­bility of being together, cre­ating together. With vagrancy at the root of its pro­ject, Champs mag­né­tiques has no set course, pre­fer­ring impulse and dis­ori­en­ta­tion.

Champs mag­né­tiques is a col­lec­tive of young cura­tors, stu­dents of the pro­fes­sional master’s degree "Contemporary art and its exhi­bi­tion" at the Sorbonne Université. Its mem­bers are Elizabeth Allen, Sergi Álvarez Riosalido, Lucie Brechette, Lisa Colin, Maria Claudia Gamboa, Magdalena Gemra, Thomas Maestro, Lola Majzels, Violette Morisseau, Léa Pagnier, Marie Plagnol and Tom Rowell.
The exhi­bi­tion "Des soleils encore verts" is sup­ported by the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD, Paris), the Sorbonne Université, the CVEC-Crous of Paris and the City of Paris. The exhi­bi­tion also ben­e­fits from an excep­tional loan of films from the Collective Young Cinema and the usage of exhi­bi­tions spaces of Mains d’Oeuvres, CAC Brétigny, Bétonsalon, DOC! and Sorbonne Université.